Recently we were invited to present at Amazon’s Global SEO Summit in Seattle. We’ve been working with the world’s largest online store for more than 4 years now and it’s always an honor to participate with this intimate group of collaborative leaders to discuss the dynamic world of e-commerce.

Because it was a private event, Amazon discussed several proprietary technologies and plans which, naturally, no one from the conference is at liberty to discuss publicly. However, I can say that we were there to present our many global projects for the group, plus discuss how eZdia might help Amazon continue to improve the user experience for its shoppers, which is the rule that makes Amazon tick. No matter what we’re doing: our primary focus is always our customers’ needs.

Amazon is an awesome partnership for us because we help improve their customer experience a little bit every day. Be it improving the look and feel of their dynamic search results, creating relevant category pages, building helpful buying guides, improving data inputs and outputs, or any other project, it’s genuinely about helping sellers and shoppers benefit from their relationship with Amazon.

For me, one of the solutions that I’m the most proud of presenting isn’t the advancements in our automation technologies, but the energetic, talented and driven community of resources that helps make our clients’ content so exceptional. Quality content can’t exist in a vacuum, and we hire creative people who take a huge amount of pride in writing and editing every single product or search landing page.

eZdia Team at Amazon Global SEO Summit in Seattle

We have workers on 6 continents who speak dozens of languages, and enjoy the access and flexibility our platform provides across every part of the 24-hour continuum. We work with everyone from full to part-time parents, caregivers, stay-at-home moms and dads, or professionals who need a little extra work to make ends meet. These are the people who have been working for our clients through CrewMachine since we founded the company and our success is almost wholly due to their drive, professionalism, passion, and effort. They are the heros in our story.

We started eZdia and developed CrewMachine with a two-fold mission: one to foster an online labor environment where creative resources could enjoy a quality work experience focused on global e-commerce; and second, to provide democratized income opportunities to thousands of workers who could not otherwise participate in the evolution of the global economy. Personally, my greatest fulfillment comes when I have the chance to talk about the positive impact eZdia has on the people that log into our platform every day.

Like Amazon, we continue to strive to support our greater vision toward creating the ultimate user, and we do this by adding busy visual designers, researchers, writers, project managers, editors, reviewers, and more to our global family every day. It may be redundant to say, but: we’re honored to be a part of this journey, along with the thousands of people that support us and make eZdia’s mission possible

Let’s work together to enjoy even more success throughout the rest of the year.

This year, we had an exciting and educational experience attending IRCE. We didn’t exhibit, which gave me plenty of time to walk the floor, attend sessions, and listen to the concerns and challenges facing the internet retailer community today. I returned with some fascinating takeaways, which I plan on discussing in more details in future posts.

As a team, we always have to keep our ear to the ground when it comes to how brands perform on Amazon. I thought these metrics in particular were key to understanding how important brand performance on the retail juggernaut is both now and into the future:

That second bubble, that recent research from Bloom revealed that over half of all product searches start on Amazon is important and revealing. When it comes to e-commerce, more and more data is showing that customers are bypassing search engines (namely Google) and going straight to Amazon to start their shopping journey..

As a fun aside, if you’re curious about which product category outperforms all others in the Amazon subscription market, the answer is diapers:

Lastly, for people who follow shopping trends closely, this metric will hardly surprise you. More and more people are shopping on mobile. According to this slide (with 2016 data from ComScore), 80 percent of all Amazon shoppers buy directly from mobile, with 43 percent of them buying exclusively with mobile:

This is a big uptick from only a few years ago. It means that you have to optimize everywhere: mobile and desktop, marketplaces and SEM. It’s a complex world out there and, as my team and I were reminded, it’s not getting any simpler any time soon for even the largest retailers on the web.

This year, the eZdia team is hosting a little group to go see the defending 2017 World Series Champions, Chicago Cubs. There are a few themes that lead us to this.

First: we are huge baseball fans and jumped at the opportunity to go to one of the storied parks in the league especially since the Cubs broke the Billy Goat Curse.

Second: we admire Theo Epstein and his application of machine learning and analytics to winning baseball championships for not only the Cubs, but the Red Sox, too. (For more info: check out both the film and book versions of his story, “Moneyball.”) Winning is never a fluke. Data and analytics is transforming sports and other industries, turning all kinds of consumers into data nerds.

The eZdia team created CrewMachine with some of the same principles that Theo Epstein uses. We deploy analytics from the biggest internet retailers on the planet to help sellers and brands win the game of product discovery.

Consumers are getting smarter everyday. They are raising the bar for the internet retail experience. Retailers and brands are constantly in search of resources to stay ahead. With our help: they can do it. We help the retailers and brands create content via our proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine and crowd solution. We think this combo is a complete game changer; at least, there aren’t any other companies that combine these approaches. What’s more: we do this while helping busy clients maintain their current work-flow.

If you are interested, our team has experts with experience solving big SEO and content optimization strategies at industry-leading retailers like Walmart, eBay and Magento. We’d love to fit you in for a quick (30 minutes tops) consultation for your e-commerce needs.

Recently, on November 7-9, 2016 the nation’s largest AI Business Conference, AI World was held in San Francisco. This year’s event was a great success with over 2,200 attendees and more than 65 sponsors and exhibitors. The conference and expo focused on how global 2000 businesses are using artificial intelligence machine learning and intelligent technologies to build a competitive advantage, drive new business opportunities and accelerate innovate efforts and gave executives the opportunity to learn more about how this technology can be used in their companies.

Conference founder and CEO of Trends Equity Eliot Weinman said, “We are extremely pleased to announce that we more than doubled our attendance expectations for our inaugural AI World 2016 program”.

Members of the eZdia team, Rahul Shah, CTO and Alok Jain, Co-CEO attended the event and spent their time interacting with industry leaders working on artificial intelligence and learned a lot about the AI industry.

3 Key Things Learned From the AI World Conference and Expo

1) Convert Calculations to Predictions

Today’s modern world includes a lot of automation and in many cases it begins with calculations based on certain parameters that never change. Information shared at the AI World conference indicate that there will soon be a movement away from these calculations and more towards predictions. In fact, artificial intelligence is enhancing the ability to make accurate predictions.

For example: Google maps traffic predictions, which constantly changed based on data that is continuously being updated or Google’s Smart Inbox that allows users to auto-reply to simple questions such as “when are you available for a meeting”? Simply by checking your calendars for available dates, Smart Inbox can automatically reply to these emails, saving users a lot of time.

Similarly, CrewMachine uses smart predictions to keep project managers informed of important information such as the probability of a project being completed on time based on the time commitments and availability of the resources. It can even predict how much money clients will have to pay in upcoming months for completion of due tasks.

2) Many Things Can’t be Coded They Have to be Learnt

Think about how a writer writes product descriptions. Information about specific attributes can’t be coded through the system, they have to be learned by people and their behavior. There are some tasks that require brain-based or cognitive abilities which have more to do with the mechanisms of how we learn. problem-solve, and pay attention rather than with any actual knowledge.

3) Machines are Good at Supervised Learning

Machines are good at supervised learning and a lot of innovation needs to happen in an unsupervised learning space. For example, when machine writes an eCommerce product description, it is trusting that the attributes are accurate and it is expecting the information in certain structured way. Along with all the data, the logic behind the data also needs to be provided and that’s supervised learning. For example, machine can be taught that when a person’s name ends with the letter ‘a’, it is probably a female name; it works as a logic behind the data.

As you can see, our team learned a lot at AI World and the expo itself was extremely successful. So much in fact that the organizers are planning to expand the conference and expo in 2017 and have already booked a date and place for next years conference.

Share conferences from BrightEdge have always been quite fruitful for us. Lots of interesting discussions around SEO, content, and e-Commerce. We meet quite a few enterprises using BrightEdge for their SEO needs and are usually looking for implementation partners to facilitate and manage some of this integration.

That’s where eZdia would find value in its solutions. Several e-commerce enterprises have signed up with eZdia post Share conferences. For those of you who don’t know what eZdia does – we are a specialized content solutions company for e-commerce content creation, moderation, and amplification. We work with large e-Commerce brands such as Staples, Amazon, Walmart and others to get large scale content initiatives under control successfully.

But this time around at Share, our focus was slightly different. eZdia recently spun out its content creation platform called CrewMachine. CrewMachine as the name suggests is a content creation platform that blends in the workforce (a.k.a. the crew) and the intelligence (a.k.a. the machine) that helps enterprises identify content gaps, enrich content elements, and track their performance.

Why CrewMachine at All?

e-Commerce content is all about scale. And it is very difficult to preserve quality with scale. At eZdia, we saw this as a recurring phenomenon with most e-Commerce we worked with. There was an inability to optimize content performance across several thousands and millions of product descriptions, buying guides, category pages and blogs. And this would result in lost market share and decreased conversion.

What if there was a system which could help to identify these content snafus easily and provide recommendations to improve conversion? Would you not use such a system? Especially if it tied in with your CMS or e-Commerce platform like Magento or Volusion? And what if we told you that we have a crew of more than 40k members who you could tap into from the platform. These folks could help to take your content to the last mile with the necessary embellishments.

So, this is how CrewMachine found its purpose. To identify gaps, create and enrich content, and offer the needed data and analytics support to loop in the content performance feedback back into new content.

CrewMachine Talk

Needless then to say, that CrewMachine attracted a lot of folks (especially in the e-Commerce) to the booth. Of course, there were a lot of questions around how the algorithms came together to create content magically.

There was also a lot of demand for the free content audit that we offered as the first step to understand their current state of content. There was a lot of interest in the demos and in seeing the whole lifecycle of content in action. Most of the interest came from large e-Commerce but we also saw smaller enterprises flocking to see a demo and trying to understand the AI component.

This conference became a big proof point to ascertain that we’re heading in the right direction with our vision. A vision to create the most futuristic platform that would solve the content problems for e-Commerce intelligently. We saw a resonance from both large e-Commerce brands and agencies in equal measure.

Conclusion

We have big announcement plans around CrewMachine as it matures to become a strong product to play in the market alongside several others. Stay tuned to hear more from us. Meanwhile I will leave you with a few video snippets of the various features that are at work.

From October 24 to 26, San Francisco will play host to the Share16 conference, and invite the world of digital marketers to share ideas, learn new tactics and get a front-row seat to the latest digital marketing innovations. Some of the world’s top SEO, content and digital brand marketers will join industry thought-leaders for a series of keynote and small-group sessions.

At Share16, participants will benefit from an industry-driven agenda, as well as networking and collaboration opportunities throughout the weekend. With real-world case study session and an effective peer-to-peer approach, the Share16 conference’s goal is to boost your career and elevate your brand’s performance.

Through lively discussion with industry experts, the Share16 digital marketing conference fosters professional development and a deeper understanding of changing digital trends and dynamics. Case study sessions will examine industry best practices and offer the opportunity for participants to learn how other marketers are addressing the challenges of the industry.